I wish I were as wise to say that I was the first to espouse this profound piece of advice, but sadly, I wasn’t. Epictetus said it. Actually, what he said specifically was “the essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” Buddha said the same thing, essentially, but as I don’t have a Pali text to back it up right now, we’ll be content with Epictetus for today.

So what does it mean, to not make your happiness depend upon external things? Well, like Albert Camus famously said, “hell is other people.” Once you put your happiness, your peace of mind, your equanimity in the hands of other people and rotten circumstance, you are truly on the road to an inner hell. “All component things decay,” as Buddha said, and that includes promises, relationships, your body, and even high-definition televisions!

I personally find the easiest way to return to happiness is to just sit and return to awareness of my breath, of my body’s sensation. Just observing these sensations rising, growing, and passing away, lets me free my mind of its chains to my external circumstances and my assessment of them. To step out of the mode of judgment and into that of peaceful awareness is truly the key to happiness. As long as you are able to control your thoughts and your attention, you have the ability to find inner peace. Believe me, the more peaceful you are, the happier you will be. I don’t mean that by being peaceful you won’t have pleasure, but rather that by maintaining a peaceful mind you will naturally stop giving external circumstances power over your mood. In other words, the more you cultivate this inner peace of mind, the less effect the traffic jam, the broken promise, or the sick body will have on your experience of happiness.

Let’s face it: we’re not in charge of other people, the weather, or the inevitable progression of the cycle of life. But as human beings, we were given the gift of being able to “meta-cognate,” which is the ability to think about how we are thinking. We can not only be aware of our thoughts, but we can also consciously choose to change them. Perhaps other species can do this too…I don’t know. But what I do know is that until you really learn to operate that wonderful machine between your years known as your brain, you really don’t have access to all the power available to you.

Work your brain, and free your mind!

Good luck!